Company’s wireless knowledge could be valuable to researchers

For the past few years, Qualcomm has housed Brain Corp. inside its San Diego headquarters, helping a team of neuroscientists create computer models that mimic certain brain activity. The company hopes the research will someday help it design smarter microchips.

Now the telecommunications giant aims to tap that research — along with its wireless expertise — to become a player in the ambitious BRAIN Initiative that President Barack Obama unveiled Tuesday in Washington.

Akin to the Human Genome Project, the Basic Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative seeks to better understand the workings of the brain to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

The administration pledged $100 million in 2014 to the effort, which is expected to take years. Private groups, including San Diego’s Salk research institute, also are contributing.

Matt Grob, Qualcomm’s chief technology officer, flew to Washington to attend the announcement of the initiative. He spoke with Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, regarding the project. In January, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Google attended a meeting at Caltech where federal officials discussed the scope of the initiative.

“Qualcomm has been working in this space for some years, and there are a couple of things we can bring to the table,” Grob said in an interview Tuesday.

The initiative likely will involve monitoring brain activity of real people. “The noninvasive ways to do that are essentially wireless,” Grob said. “That is where you would talk about proper selection of frequencies, antenna design, power levels, and detectors — ways to sense tiny currents inside a living brain.”

The company’s wireless knowledge also could be valuable to researchers building computer models and mathematical formulas on how cells in the brain connect with each other.

“It gets back to information theory and signal processing — how you are able to pull them out of the noise and process them,” Grob said. “We have a lot of deep expertise at Qualcomm on information theory. That is where a lot of the research and analysis overlaps with what is being done in the neuroscience community. “

Qualcomm also is developing technology that could someday power massive neural simulations on computers — along with software tools to analyze the results. Today, it’s hard to amass enough computer power to run realistic simulations of what’s going on in the brain, Grob said.

“We’re working on the ability to create very efficient simulations and very powerful tools,” he said. “These tools and simulations are useful to researchers and scientists, but also eventually to developers of new classes of processors and products that take advantage of what we have learned from biologically inspired architectures.”

Qualcomm has long been pushing its wireless technology into health care. It created a $100 million fund to invest in wireless health firms. Its subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, offers a hub for securely connecting wireless health monitors. And it’s sponsoring the $10 million Tricorder X Prize competition, where more than 200 teams are trying to develop a handheld health scanner.

In 2009, it invested in Brain Corp., founded by neuroscientist Eugene Izhikevich. Brain Corp. creates mathematical models of the way the brain works — right now focusing on vision and motor skills. The idea is that the next generation of consumer products might have artificial nervous systems, so these products behave more like animals and less like robots.

The company plans to dedicate a portion of its roughly $2 billion annual research and development budget toward the BRAIN Initiative. Grob declined to say how much, but it’s likely to be a fraction of the company’s overall research spending.